Let’s Talk About Content Syndication
If you want to ensure that the content you’re creating is getting maximum exposure a great way to do that is to syndicate your content. When you syndicate your content, you push your content out onto third-party sites. The content can appear in full, as a snippet or even a link. Content syndication when done right can boost views and thus increase your audience as well as your revenues.
Creating Your Syndication Plan
To get results from content syndication you need a thorough understanding the goals you have for your content. For example, if you’re trying to get more leads you really want your audience to come back to your website to sign up for your mailing list, therefore you may not want to syndicate the entire article. Instead, you may want to syndicate the headline, maybe even a blurb from the content, then link directly to the content on your website.
If your goal is to spread awareness, you may have great results syndicating entire articles to publications that are a step above yours so that you can attract new audience members. This works well if you’re allowed to have an author box. In that case, link to a landing page specific to that audience.
That brings us to ensuring that you pick the right syndication partner because each one requires different types of feeds. Some will require RSS feeds, custom URLs, thumbnails, titles, snippets or excerpts. Therefore, know your goals before you look for a partner.
Picking the Right Syndication Partner
The next step is to pick the right syndication partner. There are free syndication services as well as paid services. Some of the more well-known paid versions are Outbrain.com and Taboola.com. On these, you’ll pay by click anywhere from 20 cents and up, per click. You can find free syndication options too in various industries. You’ll have to research your industry to find those opportunities.
Choosing the right partner requires that you know your goals, understand how the technology works, and have enough content to make it worth it. Whether you want to manually syndicate content via sites like Reddit.com, or Medium.com or you want to pay for play via one of the paid options is completely informed by your goals, your budget, and the content you publish.
But whichever way you choose to go be sure to understand about canonical URLs and how they work. (https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/) Because you want to ensure that you don’t do anything to cause a duplicate content penalty. You want your work to be credited to you in every way that it can be because you create great content designed for your target market that provides value. Your efforts should be able to stand up to the technology and help you meet all your content marketing goals.